[rawbot]

> I don’t want my taxes poured all over this Your taxes are already poured all over things you don't care about, and things that are ridiculous expenses.

There's no incentive to keep a game alive after the server costs outlive the monthly income generated. Only a handful of games have been kept alive out of pure preservation or low cost (or in some cases, because the publishers just forgot about it).

Regulation might be necessary since in the last 8 years of gaming, less and less games have been able to be preserved. And we had had outrageous examples like, The Crew, where fans have been able to reverse engineer an analogue to Ubisoft's servers in less than a year. Ubisoft have no incentive, so maybe it is time they are forced to.

[lokimedes]

I'm obviously not a lawyer, but it just seems so arbitrary a problem. Doesn't the same problem happen with all other software these days? Perhaps something more radical should come into play. In the defense industry we had this thing, that the source code was held in escrow, in the case that the company went bankrupt, or a national emergency required access. What if software of a certain nature, was required to have such a thing as a continuity plan?

What I'm getting at, is if all creative souls are required to front a guarantee of eternal commitment to their creations, we will see a good deal less novelty.

[hot_gril]

Playing an old video game is among the least necessary things I can think of.